Bayview residents blast SF officials over shipyard cleanup

Marie Harrison, 68, lived in Bayview Hunters Point for 60-years and worked at the shipyard for two-years at an age of 18. She believes she has lung disease because of the pollution in the shipyard on Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2018 in San Francisco, CA.

Photo: Paul Kuroda / Special to The Chronicle

Angry Bayview residents tore into San Francisco public health officials Wednesday over the botched cleanup of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, even as the city representatives reiterated their contention that the Superfund site poses no health risks to residents or workers.

Department of Public Health environmental engineer Amy Brownell told about 30 neighborhood residents gathered at the Bayview’s Southeast Community Center that preliminary “walkover scanning surveys” performed over the last month where 450 condominiums — some occupied — have been completed or are under construction found no evidence of harmful levels of radioactive residue. The scans detected “background levels of potassium-40” at levels only “slightly above normal” and which Brownell said were harmless.

The testing, which environmentalists have criticized as inadequate, is being done by the California Department of Public Health and is about 75 percent complete.

“In all the scanning they have done, they have not found anything of concern,” said Brownell, who added that the level of potassium-40 detected is “in bananas, it’s in our bodies, it’s in wood chips. It’s in vegetation. ... That is what they have verified. They have found nothing else.”

Amy Brownell, of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, speaks at a community meeting about the Shipyard and pollution in the Bayview. on Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2018, in San Francisco, CA.

Photo: Paul Kuroda / Special to The Chronicle

The meeting comes as city, state and federal health and environmental officials are grappling with a pollution cleanup scandal that has at least temporarily derailed the Bay Area’s largest redevelopment project. The plans for the former naval shipyard call for developers Lennar and FivePoint to build more than 12,000 homes, 300 acres of parkland and millions of square feet of schools, and retail and office space in a neighborhood that historically has been one of the city’s poorest.

But while the project has had some early success in creating handsome townhomes — some have sold for more than $1.5 million — and green spaces overlooking the bay, it has been delayed by accusations that Tetra Tech, an environmental engineering company paid more than $350 million to clean up the site, engaged in widespread cheating. More than a half dozen whistle-blowers have said that to speed up the job Tetra Tech took soil samples from areas known to be clean and passed them off as coming from areas known to be heavily contaminated.

Two former Tetra Tech supervisors, Justin Hubbard and Stephen Rolfe, pleaded guilty to falsifying cleanup records, swapping suspect soil with clean dirt to make it appear that some areas were free of harmful radiation. Both were sentenced to eight months in prison. From 1946 to 1969, the mothballed shipyard was home to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, which produced barrels of radioactive waste and leached radioactivity into the buildings, pipes and soil.

But the assurances of the health officials Wednesday did little to assuage neighborhood concerns.

Ray Tompkins, a biochemist and Bayview resident who has studied the history of environmental pollution in his neighborhood, called the surface scanning an “inappropriate methodology to look for radiation.” He said that the handheld monitors won’t detect toxic materials more than a foot below the surface, and they pick up “gamma radiation” rather than some of the more harmful isotopes found at the shipyard, like strontium-90 and plutonium-239.

“It’s a lot of BS — bad science that’s being pushed on this community,” he said. “The only way to ensure the public there is no radiation left on the base is to do core samples — you drill into the earth.”

Like other residents, Leotis Martin pointed to the health problems Bayview residents have long experienced.

“The Navy should have cleaned up their own damn yard in the first place,” Martin said. “We need someone to watch over whoever is going to clean up now. Because we don’t trust you all. You all have been lying to us for years. Every time you open up your mouth, it’s wrong. ... Our people are dying. Why should we trust you?”

The meeting was convened by the Bayview-Hunters Point Environmental Justice Response Task Force.

Bradley Angel, the executive director of Greenaction, a local environmental watchdog group, criticized Brownell and the city’s role in the scandal.

“This is one hell of a rigged process,” Angel said. “A totally rigged process and it’s a toxic radioactive cover-up not just because of the toxic and radioactive waste at the site, but because of the lies, omissions and misinformation you have put forward.”

Brownell also released an Aug. 9 letter from Enrique Manzanilla, director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund division, saying that the “EPA does not believe anyone living or working at HPNS faces health risks due to fraudulent data collection work by Tetra Tech.

“Regarding Parcel A (where the condominiums have been built), based on site history and our knowledge of the cleanup performed, EPA similarly believes that there is no current health risk to residents or workers from actions of Tetra Tech,” it read.

“They didn’t do their jobs correctly,” Brownell told the group. “They admitted it. They went to jail. They have defrauded the federal government, and now the federal government has had to redo work because of their actions.”

Two retesting efforts are in progress.

In addition to Parcel A, the Navy is finalizing a plan to test Parcel G, an undeveloped area intended to eventually hold housing and commercial uses. The EPA and the Navy released a retesting plan in June, and residents had until Thursday to comment on the methodology. Testing is expected to begin this fall.

Longtime Bayview activist Marie Harrison accused city officials of caring more about the success of the development than the health of the community.

“I have a lot of built-up anxiety,” said Harrison, who spent 16 years on a now-disbanded community board that monitored the cleanup. “I don’t know how long I am going to be here. But I sure as hell am not going anywhere until I make sure you all clean up that shipyard correctly.”

J.K. Dineen joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 2014, focusing on real estate development for the metro group, a beat that includes land use, housing, neighborhoods, the port, retail, and city parks. Prior to joining The Chronicle, he worked for the San Francisco Business Times, the San Francisco Examiner, the New York Daily News, and a bunch of newspapers in his native Massachusetts, including the Salem Evening News and the MetroWest Daily News.

He is the author of two books: Here Tomorrow, about historic preservation in California (Heyday, 2013); and the forthcoming High Spirits (Heyday 2015), a book of essays about legacy bars of San Francisco.

A graduate of Macalester College, Dineen was a member of Teach For America’s inaugural class and taught sixth grade in Brooklyn, N.Y.